Genre: Book
Grade: A-/ B+
Notable People: James Lee Burke
Title: Every Cloak Rolled in Blood
Review: this may be the most challenging book to review (as in grade) yet for me. I believe that Burke may be one of the 2-3 greatest living American authors-and that is an opinion shard by quite few. By his own forward to this book, this is his most personal work of his 60 plus books, and in his opinion, his best. It is clearly his most autobiographical and emotional; in many ways the story of his extraordinary grief after the passing of his daughter, Pamela, which coincided with the inherent losses of the pandemic. The book is gut wrenching and extremely powerful. I like a lot of that, but it is also pretty out there in terms of mysticism/ephemerality……and sometimes hard to tell between the two. This was a quite hard read for me at times; both painful and consuming, but then there is his legendary prose to consider. How do you ignore a sentence (run on as it may be like this: “And the most poignant image of all, the one that defined the existential and ephemeral and heartbreaking imprint on our souls, one we could neither quarrel with nor of our own volition, choose to reject; an orange moon in late autumn above an ocean of sugarcane swirling in the wind, the stalks hammered with streaks of purple and gold, clacking like broomsticks, the smoke from the sugar refineries electrified with floodlights, all of it as transient as an ancient fish working its way out of the sea and onto the sand.” .
Burke is an American giant of letters and this book basks in many of the themes and characters of his legacy. If you like Burke, worth a try…he is a great, great writer.
